Halves, Pins, Pieces
by Sarapsys
Summary: vignettes about Mello and Near. #3 Near wishes Rester would stop trying to strike up conversation with him.
1. Wane

**Not sure what it is about being hideously busy that makes me want to procrastinate and write fic, but there it is. Not really sure where this is going, I just have a small handful of randomish, half-finished, semi-connected Wammy vignettes** **that I'd like to polish off. Might develop into a coherent storyline but probs not. Hope everyone's finals are going well, to those whom it applies...  
><strong>

* * *

><p><span>Wane<span>

The migraines first start when Mello is nine. It's a while after one of the other students, the quiet one that never seems to care what's going on around him, finally gets with the program and begins taking L seriously.

The sliver more than minimum effort the younger boy expends once he decides the title is at least as worthwhile as airplane models sends him rocketing from Seventh to Second on the Blackboard at a rate that has the staff thinking there's been an administrative mistake. Mello has never noticed the other boy much before now, not really. He's never drawn attention to himself. Hardly speaks. Never makes a fuss. He's easy to overlook.

To be honest, Mello's always thought Near was a bit daft. Until now.

-o-

All through that winter Mello and Near wrestle between First and Second. That year is much colder than usual. The heaters crank out full blast without filling the rooms. Extra blankets are pulled out of storage and piled on the beds, slightly moth-eaten and mismatching. Mello shivers through it on the razor edge of his nerves. He spends long hours in the library with hot tea he has no intention of drinking clutched in his hands and three pairs of socks on, determined to stay on top where he belongs for more than 72 consecutive hours.

Near comes down horribly sick, which is fairly standard for Near, shakes with fever under a mountain of old spare blankets from the end of January til Valentine's. The absence of his new rival is a breath of fresh air; even the floors seem less cold underfoot and the homework less onerous. For those two weeks Mello is undisputed king of the Blackboard again. Euphoric, he observes to half the common room one evening that grades aside, the L machine could never afford to gamble on someone so weak and sickly. The comment spreads among the students like a prairie fire, and evidently makes its way to the weak and sickly child in question.

When Near gets better, he snatches the top slot his first week back and stays there for good.

As far as revenges go, it's very effective. The realization that his rival has been holding back all this time is just quicklime in the cut. Near has been toying with him.

Why? Who knows.

Because he's a spiteful little lunatic, probably, Mello figures. Whatever his reasons, he's apparently gotten tired of them, and now Mello's scrambling to pay him back for the humiliation.

Mello pulls two all-nighters in a row to prepare for the next battery of tests, eating nine bars of the chocolate he suddenly craves and ignoring the squiggly, zig-zagging rings that spiral over his vision, and is hit by his first ever migraine like an anvil under a driving hammer.

The nurse and the head of curriculum argue in the hall about whether he should be put on bedrest or sent to class while he curls in bed with his head under his pillow, feeling like he's going to be sick and trying to eavesdrop on the conversation even though their words are clanging against his right temple like heavy church bells. Eventually they take it to Roger, who doesn't care to hear their bickering and so decides Mello will sleep it off for one day and work hard to catch up the next day. One day later the hammer is still there. Mello lies and says he is fine, because second place is bad enough. He throws up in the middle of algebra and is ordered back to bed by the nurse, who radiates _I told you so_, and he staggers off with her on the sole condition that someone brings him his homework to do in bed.

He fails to specify _someone other than Near_. So naturally, in a galling exception to his antisocial habits, it's Near who volunteers to bring all his reading and assignment sheets.

"Go away," Mello groans when he sees him, burrowing deeper under the covers and fisting his pillow over his throbbing head. He's been working very hard to sleep it off as quickly as possible, but the harder he tries the less sleepy and more miserable he feels. The nurse says he needs to relax. His rival's visit does not improve things. The painkillers should be helping more than they are. Near's a pain. They should take a stab at him.

"I wasn't going to stay," Near murmurs. He slips the thick sheaf of assignments onto the desk, the whisper of paper on wood like a metal rasp against Mello's ear. Socks pad softly back across the carpet to the door, where his rival pauses. "I know neither of us believes in karma, Mello, but I personally find this to be an amusingly appropriate coincidence."

Mello grumbles obscenities into his mattress and can hear the smugness in the creak-swing and click of the door.

-o-

Later he reads that stress is a common trigger for migraines. The one thing he's pretty well guaranteed to always have in abundance. It's not fair. The next time Near gets sick Mello volunteers to bring him his homework and the head of curriculum, who sees through his mask of sincerity like glass, says _no and behave_.

-o-

"Do you ever think," Near says one day, partway through fall exams, "that they are deliberately trying to break our limits."

Yesterday Weak-and-Sickly-but-Still-First staggered out of a ten-day battle with the flu. (But still never slipped from the top of the Blackboard.) He still looks wan and hollowed, translucent in the late golden light washing over the windowseat with his forehead pressed tiredly to the glass and his fingers slow on the rope puzzle, but all his homework is somehow finished and he's solved and reset the puzzle five times in the last five minutes.

Since morning Mello has felt the onset of a migraine coming on, tingling in his right arm and stoking his chocolate cravings.

They both wax and wane, but Near is always brighter.

And of course the House is pushing their limits, that is their purpose. To be tested. To be pushed as far as they can without breaking. Mello knows Near is not talking about their exams, but of their lives in general.

"Hm," Near hums when it becomes clear that silence is Mello's answer.

The note is bleached of resentment or frustration. Apparently the thought that Wammy's would not hesitate drive them into the ground just to see if they'd keep running and throw them out if they don't is a new realization for the eight-year-old, but not one that strikes him as unjust. Mello wonders if this frictionless acceptance is part of why Near doesn't struggle like he does, and spirals ping over his vision and he leaves the room with his jaws clenched, goes to his room and turns out the lights.


	2. Pinioned

**A while ago I wrote a prompt generator for kicks and giggles, and now I actually have time to put it to use. Prompts for this ficlet were 'Stuck in the Wrong Body' and 'Best Foot Forward'. Also incidentally this story is not really connected to or compat with the previous ficlet.  
><strong>

Pinioned

Appearances aren't everything, but they're a lot. People make judgments and react based on appearances. If Mello had taken up L's affectation for nailing down his gut feelings as percentages like Near had, he'd say surviving a dangerous situation is 30% preparation, 30% resourcefulness, and 40% keeping up appearances.

Mello has never been in the habit of wasting valuable advice by giving it away. He probably wouldn't say it anyway.

He first starts wearing leather gloves to cover up how slender and delicate his hands are, to turn their china daintiness into something industrial. Same thing with the heavy boots. The unforgiving tightness of everything else is so nobody will suspect he's trying to hide anything. The feathers, well. Honestly, he just likes the textural contrast to all the leather.

-o-

Mello lost the only fistfight he's ever been in. Lost in the sense that it ended with him unconscious, and the other boy still standing.

Violence is an inelegant solution. Mello hates resorting to violence, precisely because it's a last resort. The necessity of force is a failure of threat, of reputation, of the ability to intimidate. Battles in the House are mental ones. Only people who can't handle psychological weapons with finesse and skill stoop to the level of fists. Real power is controlling people's minds.

_Fear_ of violence, now, that is a tactic Mello can appreciate.

When he was eight, Mello didn't know how to throw a proper punch. What he did know was strategy: if you can't beat them now, pre-empt their next attack and make sure you win the war. Focused as a pit bull on a bleeding steak, Mello concentrated his counter-assault on the boy's face. Injuries that couldn't be hidden, that would make an impression on onlookers for days after. Anything that bled got scratched and worried at and smeared until it looked ten times nastier than it was. With a black eye, two cracked ribs and a slight concussion, Mello was the worse off of the two. It didn't matter, because he sure as hell didn't look it. The winner of that long-ago fight, who had three years and sixty pounds on Mello, ended up with his chin and face and neck and the front of his shirt caked red from a broken nose, split lip, bitten ear, and a tangle of scratches from Mello's sharp little nails. He looked like he'd been force-fed his heart for breakfast. He looked like Mello had gutted his reputation in front of him and ground his face into the viscera.

Even among a group of kids trained to value results above pathos, it made an impression. No one at the House tried to pick a fight with Mello after that, physical or otherwise.

-o-

Mello has shot only two people. Most people he knew, before they got blown up, assume it's a lot more.

One bullet each, both to kill. He practiced for months on a range before attempting either to make sure there would be no mistakes.

Once to confirm to himself in private that he was capable of doing it without being sick, once to prove to Rod's goonies that he would not hesitate to do it. The first was attempting to mug him. The second was carefully selected: someone who was merely irritating to him, not a real threat. A buzzing fly on a swampy day. A bit of gravel in his boot. Expendable to the organization, and worthless to Mello except as an example.

It was at a party, winding down. Garish lights, sticky floor, white-dusted mirror tiles on tables with old-fashioned glasses of melting ice, sweaty paid-for girls in sequins and a smog of perfume, people starting to laugh too loud, ready to disperse into darker corners for more private pursuits. Mello watched and lounged and curled at the bar like a young panther, drinking only water, as he always did. He ladled out charm when appropriate and smirked and watched, blue-hot eyes alert and dismissive. When Rod and his higher-ups spoke to him he handed over verbal baubles, made them laugh without inviting them in: expensive conversational jewelry for hookers. And when a dealer sidled up, told him he had pretty hands and offered to buy him a drink, Mello glanced at him, pulled out his gun, and shot him in the forehead.

He'd come on to Mello before. Everybody knew it. He hadn't been the only one.

He _was_ the last one.

-o-

Mello has had any belief in fairness burned out of him. If fairness existed, Near would have asphyxiated himself during an anxiety attack years ago.

His father was a lion of a man with a strong jaw, athletic stride, and an eye for the ladies. Mello's mother had been one of many: slender, pretty, blonde, with large clear eyes. Memories of his parents are scarce and dim, but it is obvious which one he takes after.

When the other boys his age started shooting up into knobbly stick-and-ball figures that needed new trousers every three months, Mello got the knobbliness without the height. When their shoulders started to spread and their hands and wrists grew square and bulky, his stayed slight and graceful.

It's not fair, even though he doesn't believe in fair. There is some small consolation that his rival is a stunted, bloodless runt kept alive by vitamins, with jellied bones and blue-marbled skin like something found in a damp, lightless cave. It's a low bar to compare against. Like telling himself that even if he can't beat Near where it matters, at least he can think circles around a chimpanzee.

Whatever. He learns to play the hand that's dealt to him.

-o-

Mello does not do things by half.

When he devises a plan, he covers all the angles, blocks or booby-traps every route his enemy might take so that they're led up the path right to where he wants them. His last resorts have backup plans. When he shoots, he shoots to kill. And when he says he will not hesitate to press the red button, he doesn't let anyone call his bluff.

The one thing he often fails to consider is the collateral damage. Anger builds the walls of his tunnel vision, pushes him down hallways and through doors into consequences that he barges through with yet more grit-jawed anger.

Usually he can shutter his long-burning rage like a lamp and lets out blinding glimpses of it only when he needs it. The only person who can flick the shutters aside with ease is a childhood rival, distant but always too near, far too present these days in his mind and in his plans and probably in his quickly approaching future.

If he has one.

-o-

Four days after everything came apart, his voice still cracks and gravels from smoke inhalation. Any doctor would probably tell him he should lying down, marinating in IV fluid, getting prepped for a skin graft. Also that he should not have broken out of the hospital and skipped the un-insured bill as soon as he could walk, but he doesn't have time for all of that right now. Kira is out there—Near is out there—_now_. He's bought a ticket for a cross-country bus that leaves for New York in two days, and he will be ready to travel by then. Whether he is or not.

Mello has never been shot, himself (though he has been shot at). He has not been in a physical altercation that resulted in injury since that one long ago, in the Wammy's schoolyard.

Queasiness has never been one of his defining qualities. At just shy of 21, he has seen limbs and organs reduced to hamburger by bullets, flesh butchered by blades, faces and hands rusted and dissolved by addiction. He has seen what damage can be done to the human body.

Experiencing it is a whole different beast.

He refuses to think of himself as crippled, even though he's deaf and half blind on one side now and can barely lift his arm to shoulder height without involuntarily croaking in pain. Around and around the filthy hole of a hotel room he's renting right now, he walks and strides and makes quick turns, pivoting on one foot then the other, retraining his sense of balance.

The pain is terrible, but not unbearable. Mello fights fire with fire, keeping the pain at bay with fury at this turn of events. He's had more Gatorade and apple juice in the last three days than his entire childhood and is popping down naproxen pills like M&Ms. The burn has started peeling around the edges, the side of his nose and his forehead and chest and behind what's left of his ear, where it's not as bad. The itchiness is almost worse than the pain. Scratching at it would exacerbate the damage, increase the possibility of infection.

Every night between midnight and three or so he's been taking a trip to the corner convenience store. He doesn't like going out so often, but there's only so much ice and Gatorade he can carry at a time, and it's vital he stays hydrated and keeps up his electrolytes while he recovers from the worst of the burns. And he can't afford to get stuff delivered right now. He refuses to be so afraid to be seen that he'll steal just to avoid a three-block hike in the middle of the night. Nobody would recognize him in this part of town, and most of the people he would worry about are dead now anyway. There is nobody here that can hurt him except for himself. He's weak right now, weaker than he's been in a long time. But not so weak that he can't keep up appearances.

The girl who works the graveyard shift at the dirty little store is afraid of him. God, he hates that bleach-haired bitch.

Prettiness was dealt to him by genetics. Mello has had most of his life to learn to play the card to its fullest advantage, turned it from a weakness to a weapon, honing and polishing his image into one of dark, compact sleekness, that he wore and used as comfortably as his handgun. Perhaps he's come to depend on it a little too much. That card has been spent now in a single desperate play. Fear, intimidation, apprehension, resentment, these are all feelings he has been kindling in the eyes of others for years now.

The disgust is new, the pity reminds him of Near and neither is welcome. The first night, he stares back defiantly, unblinking and daring her to look at the raw, blistered half of his face. Out here, outside the deadly competitive mazes of the House and the Mafia, people are easily cowed. Now when the jingling door announces his arrival, she makes herself intensely busy arranging cigarette cartons instead of watching him pick out his daily case of neon electrolyte juice.

Mello doesn't know her name, only that he despises her. People are disturbed by grotesque injuries because they don't like to be reminded of the frailty of their own bodies, not because they think the injured are actually threatening to them. She fears him for all the wrong reasons.

-o-

By the time he gets on the bus the burn is stiffened and scarred up. He grabbed some patient education pamphlets on burns while sneaking out of the hospital, and as far as Mello can tell it's healing up the way it's supposed to, even if the discoloration is worse than he hoped. It itches like mad, too, which is apparently also a good sign. Infection at this point is much less likely. Maybe the powers that be are not entirely against him.

The glass of the window is hazed over with feathered ice. It doesn't show his reflection when he glances sidelong at it. A man starts to sit in the seat beside him. Mello turns, hot eyes and half-healed scar glaring from the shadow of his hood. The stranger pulls back, eyes flicking over the burn, and moves on. When the packed bus pulls out, Mello has the seat to himself.

The frozen glass would probably feel good against the burn. Mello is sure it wouldn't be hygienic. He unscrews another bottle of Gatorade.

It's not the hand you're dealt, he reminds himself, it's how you play it. How you play the other players at the table.

Keeping up appearances.


	3. Blinds

Blinds

"Have you been to New York before?" The sudden question prints dimly on Near's ears.

He wishes Rester would stop trying to strike up conversation with him. He does not really need the man at the moment. The agent should continue his inspection of the SPK's new facility. Near does not think he minds being all by himself for a little bit, at least, even in this new and strange environment. Still, he says nothing.

(To be fair to Rester, which Near will not, it's only the second question unrelated to the nascent investigation he's asked in the three days since L's heir arrived in America.)

This office is cased in glass, floor-to-ceiling windows baring an entire wall to the dizzy void that boxes them in at 40 floors above the street. Near knows that he will not use this room. It is too bright, too loud in light and color and the suggestion, however untrue, that its inhabitants can be seen as clearly as the mirrored test tube racks of the skyscrapers around it.

He has not been to New York before. He has never been anywhere more populated than the sleepy town of Winchester.

Far below, people roil and squirm in black streams, the sidewalks an ant farm that has fallen and shattered on a clean floor. All these towering buildings should be able to contain them, there is space enough to shelve and order them, but they are spilled out into the streets where they breathe loudly and rumble and almost hit each other with their noisy, stinking cars.

The key to objectivity is distance. Near accepts that he dislikes the city, and is unsurprised by the fact. Leaning close to the window without touching, leaving no fingerprints, he examines the flooding crowds and his discomfort through glass and concludes that 40 floors and a few sheets of glass is not enough distance for him. Television and computer screens are far preferable.

He may get blinds installed in these upper offices, even if he never uses them.


End file.
